Psychological test can help predict whether the love will last

Just think of how much emotional pain could be avoided if humans knew just when to exit a romantic relationship? Knowing whether to break up or stay together is a wrenching question that often lacks an easy answer.

Until now, that is. Researchers at the University of Rochester say they have devised a test to tell if a relationship is going to fall apart. The test involves uncovering what people really -- meaning really -- think of or feel about their partners. Previous studies show people are often unable or reluctant to express their true feelings about their partners. "[T]hat assumes that they know themselves how happy they are, and that's not always the case," a coauthor of the study, Ronald D. Rogge, explained in a news release.

Rogge and his colleagues devised a test in which volunteers supplied their partner's first name and two other words that related to the person -- like a pet name or distinct characteristic. The volunteers then watched a monitor as words were presented. The words conveyed positive ideas, such as "vacation" and "peace" along with the partner-related words they supplied or bad ideas, such as "tragedy" and "criticize," and the partner-related words. The respondents were asked to press a bar when they saw various words. One test featured the bad and partner-related words, and the other the good words and partner-related words. The idea was to get people's automatic reactions to the words. If people have generally good associations with their partners, they would perform the "good words" task easier than the "bad words."

That is, in fact, what happened. The volunteers who found it easier to associate their partner with bad things, and had greater difficulty associating their partner with good things, were more likely to separate over the next year.

Such a measure could be useful to therapists in trying to uncover feelings clients are unwilling to divulge and to differentiate the nature of the problem in a relationship, the authors wrote.

"[I]n deteriorating relationships, the negative associations people begin to form about their partner may be too subtle or threatening for them to recognize in themselves or too socially undesirable for them to report to others," they wrote.

The study was released Wednesday in the journal Psychological Science.

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Popperfoto / Getty Images

Touch and go – what you touch may influence how you feel

Having a rough day? Got a soft spot for ice cream? It might be more than a feeling. In fact, tactile contact –  touching something light or heavy, smooth or rough, soft or hard – can have a profound effect on your perceptions and judgments, even when the object has nothing to do with the task at hand.

In a study published Thursday in the journal Science, a team of researchers from Harvard University, Yale University and MIT tested people’s subconscious responses to feeling objects of different weights and textures.

- In one case, participants had to evaluate a resume, some reading it on a light clipboard and others on a heavy one; the heavy clipboard readers thought the applicant was more serious about the job.

- In another study, people were asked to complete a puzzle, either with smooth or sandpaper-covered pieces, and then judge the harshness of a social interaction; those who did the “rough” puzzle thought the interaction was harsher. 

- The researchers also found that people sitting in wooden chairs, as compared to cushioned chairs, drove a harder bargain in a mock car sale. They believe that the participants associated the hard chair with strictness and stability, and thus were less likely to budge on their offer price.

In other words, even though the heavy, rough or hard objects weren’t directly related to the assigned task, they clearly affected people’s behavior.

Here's the abstract to the touch study.

Given the prevalence of tactile metaphors in our everyday language, the associations found in the study – heavy equals serious, rough equals difficult, hard equals strict – make sense. Still, it’s impressive that the subconscious cues just from touching something can have such a discernable effect on our impressions and behavior.

So, which came first, the emotions or the language?

It’s tempting to say that our idioms reflect innate qualities of objects – a hard, rough, heavy rock, for example – but trying to spell out the connection suggests that it's not quite so simple.

After all, what's so serious or difficult or strict about a rock?

— Rachel Bernstein

Photo: Sometimes, a touch can be worth a thousand words. Photo credit: Los Angeles Times.

Personality neuroscience: A new science of mind, or Phrenology 2.0? [Updated]

Psychologists who study the infinite variety of humans' personalities and temperaments often find themselves drawn to biological explanations of the personality traits that make us who we are. They surmise that factors such as heredity or brain structure must play key roles in whether we are outgoing or introverted, easygoing or prone to worry, callous or caring toward others.

But take that line of reasoning too far, and you get dangerously close to phrenology, a kind of science-cum-parlor game that was all the rage during much of the 19th century. The idea behind phrenology was that each of the mind's faculties lies at an exact and predictable spot in the brain, and that a person's propensities -- her tendency to embrace new challenges, his inclination to view others' motives suspiciously -- could be divined simply by observing the size and shape of his or her skull, which was thought to reflect the size and shape of the underlying faculties.

[Updated at 9:10 a.m.: An earlier version of this posting incorrectly identified phrenology as nephrology.]

This, of course, required complex maps of the head and specialists -- readers, if you will -- to guide the curious in discovery of themselves or others. It all looked very scientific -- and in some ways, helped give rise to the field we now know as neuroscience. But it came almost two centuries before the invention of imaging technologies capable of mapping the brain and watching it work. So the precise location of the mind's "faculties" was pretty much a shot in the dark.

But what if there was a germ of truth to the idea that personality traits do basically reside in predictable regions of the brain, and that the size or shape of those regions do reflect the fundamental makeup of a person's character? That is the intriguing preliminary finding of a study published this week in the journal Psychological Science. And it is the basis for a fledgling discipline called "personality neuroscience."

The "big five" personality traits -- extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness or intellect -- are the dimensions of character that psychologists seem to agree make up each person's unique personality "fingerprint." Guided by neuroscience findings suggesting specific roles for certain brain regions, a team of researchers led by University of Minnesota psychologist Colin DeYoung measured the size of several regions in 116 healthy subjects' brains. They also had the subjects fill out standardized personality inventories, allowing them to locate each subject on the continuum of each of the "big five" traits.

For all but one of the "big five" -- openness, or intellect -- the researchers found that specific brain structures did vary in size in ways that tracked closely with a subject's score on one of the "big five" traits. If a subject scored highly on, say agreeableness, she was more likely to show greater heft in her brain's posterior cingulate cortex, which becomes active when a person exercises empathy. An extrovert was more likely to have a brawnier medial orbitofrontal cortex, a region known to be involved in responding to social reward.  

Unlike the phrenologists of the 19th century, DeYoung's team doesn't presume to know whether differences in the size of a brain region give rise to unique personality characteristics, or whether our personality differences cause our brains to develop in unique ways -- say, that when we practice random acts of kindness, our "agreeableness" center grows larger, or that a lifetime of social isolation might cause a region associated with "extraversion" to shrink.   

-- Melissa Healy

Broken hearts hurt men more than women

Women may shed more tears over a busted romantic relationship, but men suffer the greater emotional toll, researchers say.

In a study of more than 1,000 men and women, ages 18 to 23, researchers found that unhappy romances cause men more emotional grief, including threatening their identity and feelings of self-worth. Young men and women express their distress at a breakup differently. Women are more likely to feel depressed after a breakup, while men are more likely to have substance-abuse problems.

Men may be more affected by a breakup because their romantic partners are their primary source of intimacy. Women, however, are more likely to have other close relationships with friends or family members to turn to for support, said the study's author, Robin Simon of Wake Forest University.

Nonmarital relationships are important to a young adult's well-being, Simon said. "However, the advantages of partner support and disadvantages of partner strain are more closely associated with men's than women's mental health," she wrote.
 
The study is published in the June issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

-- Shari Roan

Photo credit: Javier Etxezarreta  /  EPA

Lesbian parents have very well-adjusted kids, study finds

Some people might be surprised by the latest research on children of lesbian parents, published in the journal Pediatrics. But perhaps they should give it more thought. 

This was the objective of researchers at the University of California and the University of Amsterdam:

To document the psychological adjustment of adolescents who were conceived through donor insemination by lesbian mothers who enrolled before these offspring were born in the largest, longest running, prospective, longitudinal study of same-sex–parented families.

This was the conclusion:

The [National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study] adolescents are well-adjusted, demonstrating more competencies and fewer behavioral problems than their peers in the normative American population.

Here's a WebMD story with author Nanette Gartrelle explaining the positive results. "These are not accidental children," she points out. And that's just for starters. 

Read the full lesbian parenting study here.

-- Tami Dennis

Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

College students may be lacking in empathy, study finds

Older generations often accuse younger ones of not being up to snuff in many ways, such as upholding values and morals. But they may be onto something -- a new study found that college students may be seriously lacking in empathy that previous generations apparently had in spades.

The study, a meta-analysis, looked at 72 studies of American college students conducted from 1979 to 2009. Those studies measured empathy on the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, a 28-item scale that gauges aspects of interpersonal sensitivity:

-- Empathic concern (feelings of sympathy for others' misfortunes).

-- Perspective taking (how people imagine others' points of view).

-- Fantasy (how people identify with fictional characters in books or movies).

-- Personal distress (how people feel when they see the misfortunes of others).

From 1979 to 2009, college students' scores on empathic concern and perspective taking declined overall. There were no substantial changes in fantasy or personal distress.

Converting the changes in scores to percentiles, researchers found a 48% decrease in empathic concern and a 34% decrease in perspective taking through the years.

In another associated analysis, the study authors found that Americans have noticed changes in peoples' kindness and helpfulness throughout the same time period.

To what do the researchers attribute these changes? A number of social and cultural changes, including an increasing emphasis on the self; an overactive media that bombards people with violent, horrific images and gradually desensitizes them; and the growth of social media. On that, the authors wrote, "With so much time spent interacting with others online and not in reality, interpersonal dynamics like empathy might certainly be altered. For example, perhaps it is easier to establish friends and relationships online, but these skills might not translate into smooth social relations in real life...."

"College students today may be so busy worrying about themselves and their own issues that they don't have time to spend empathizing with others, or at least perceive such time to be limited," said University of Michigan graduate student Edward O'Brien, in a news release. O'Brien was one of the co-authors of the study that was presented at the annual meeting of the Assn. for Psychological Science held in Boston this week.

-- Jeannine Stein

Photo: Have college students become less empathetic? Photo credit: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

People who are certain they stink, and the psychiatrists who sense this may be a disorder [Updated]

Psychiatrists meeting this week in New Orleans at their annual confab got a first look at a largely unresearched patient population beset with a deeply distressing delusion: that they smell bad -- really bad.

Patients with the proposed diagnosis of "olfactory reference disorder" (sometimes referred to as a "syndrome") are certain beyond doubt that they stink, when in fact they smell no worse than is average for a 21st century American. According to Dr. Katharine Phillips, director of Rhode Island Hospital's Body Image Program, four in 10 people who likely have the disorder have sought out medical treatments for what they believe to be bad breath, foul body odor, stinky feet or residual fecal or urine smell. Their worry preoccupies them for between three and eight hours a day, on average, and impels patients to shower for hours, consume bars of soap or gallons of mouthwash in a single day -- even to drink perfume in an effort to eradicate the imagined smell.

A slight majority -- 60% -- of sufferers appear to be women, Phillips told her colleagues, and most began to suspect that they emitted foul odors at around 15 to 16 years of age. 

For people afflicted with this delusion, social situations can be a gantlet of shame and self-consciousness, said Phillips: When people with whom they come into contact innocently scratch their noses or a stray allergen causes someone to sniff, people with this unique bodily delusion report they feel certain it is in response to their own foul body odor. Another person's move to open a window or door in a stuffy room will fill such a patient with fear that he or she has stunk up the place. When they confide their fears to others and are assured they smell perfectly fine, these patients do not believe it: They suspect a friend is just being nice or has a poor sense of smell, Phillips said.

Not surprisingly, 40% report they have remained housebound for at least a week out of fear of offending others. Two-thirds have contemplated suicide, and a third have attempted it, Phillips reported. The vast majority suffer from depression or some other mental disorder, and substance abuse -- possibly an effort to "self-medicate," according to Phillips -- is common.

"I'm just so struck by the incredible distress they're feeling, the incredible sense of social ostracism," Phillips said. 

Is it real -- not the body odor, but the psychiatric disorder? That is something psychiatrists will likely begin to explore over the next decade: The American Psychiatric Assn. has proposed adding "olfactory reference disorder" to the appendix of the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual (DSM) V as an entity worthy of further research and consideration. Among the many questions that must be explored before the nation's psychiatrists would consider conferring on "olfactory reference disorder" the full status of a diagnosable disease: How widespread are these symptoms in the general population? How impairing is it? How does it start and manifest itself over a patient's life? Are these symptoms more closely related to compulsive behavior, depression, body dysmorphia? And what therapies does it respond to?

On this last point, Phillips said there is early evidence that cognitive behavioral therapy -- a form of "talk therapy" that is narrowly focused on problematic behavior and the thought processes that contribute to it -- can be helpful to some sufferers. She said antidepressants that are in wide use -- known as SSRIs -- may help some as well.

An article in the Journal of Family Pracitice is a good overview of the condition. If you think you may suffer from this, you could take this test. For a Los Angeles-based treatment program, see here.

-- Melissa Healy

[Updated at 12:15 p.m.: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated the number of people who have sought out medical treatments for "olfactory reference disorder."]

Why overhearing cellphone conversations is annoying

It's OK. You're not being unreasonably grumpy when you become irritated by a nearby cellphone conversation. A new study shows why the ever-present cellphone conversations going on around us -- in the grocery store, mall, airport, elevator, on the bus, etc. -- feel so intrusive.

Cellphones have made phone conversations ubiquitous. But many people confess to feeling a bit startled, then irritated, when they hear speech, think someone is talking to them and then realize the person nearby is talking to someone else on the phone. It turns out that our brains just don't like this phenomenon. Researchers at Cornell University conducted a series of tests to gauge people's reactions when exposed to four background noise settings: silence, a monologue, a conversation between two people and half a conversation (called a halfalogue). The study participants were seated at computers and asked to perform various cognitive tests while exposed to one of the three sounds or silence.

The study showed that hearing the halfalogue was the only background noise that distracted the study participants and lowered their scores on the cognitive tests. For some reason, our brains are unable to tune out half a conversation. Researchers believe this is because we can't predict the speech pattern of a halfalogue the way we can with a monologue or two-way conversation -- making it harder to ignore.

Besides the mere annoyance factor, halfalogues can result in impaired performance in some settings, such as in a car. "These results suggest that a driver's attention can be impaired by a passenger's cellphone conversation," the authors wrote.

The study also provides more evidence that we understand speech, in part, by anticipating what someone will say.

"We believe this finding helps reveal how we understand language in conversation," the lead author of the study, Lauren Emberson, said in a news release. "We actively predict what the person is going to say next and this reduces the difficulty of language comprehension."

The study will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science.

-- Shari Roan

Photo: Anja Niedringhaus / Associated Press

Stress and worry ebb, happiness grows after 50

Imagine that life were a board game -- let's call it, "Are We There Yet?"

The objective of the game -- "getting there" -- could be to attain happiness and even, say, wisdom (a very new-age board game). It could also be to avoid the pitfalls of illness and despair and reach the end of a long and healthy life (a board game for the slightly more worry-prone).

No matter which objective you choose, the game will look about the same: According to a study   published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, those two endpoints -- happiness and long life -- pretty much follow the same course. Happiness -- maybe even wisdom -- grows as you pass midlife and get closer to the end. 

How'd they figure this out? In a 2008 survey underwritten by the Healthways Inc., the Gallup Organization asked 355,344 Americans from 18 to 84 not only to rate their general level of well-being but also the levels of happiness, enjoyment, stress, worry, sadness and anger they had felt the previous day. Respondents' well-being showed a clear pattern across the age span: for men, happiness and enjoyment hit a low point, on average, somewhere in their 40s, and women's nadir of happiness and enjoyment came between 50 and 53. From there, a significant upward turn began, and continued to improve into the octogenarian years.

There were lots of chutes and ladders along the way. Players -- er, respondents -- had to work their way past the heart-pounding peak of stress in their mid-20s, and endure declining but continued stress through their 30s and 40s. But after about 50, stress took a deep plunge. High levels of worry threatened to impede forward progress for men in the 46-49 years and peak for women at 50-53, but then declined steadily. Anger burned hottest at 18-21, stayed pretty high into the early 40s, when a sudden explosion of rage could cause a loss of turn. Then, it steadily declined.

We all know women live longer, but this survey makes clear it's a little harder on them than it is on men. At all ages, their reported levels of "enjoyment" are lower than mens'. At all ages, their levels of stress and worry are significantly higher than those of men. At all ages, their reported sadness is higher than mens'. Only their levels of anger were the equal of mens' throughout the lifespan.

Want a personal tour of the booming landscape of happiness? You'll want to check out Harvard's "Happier" guru. And have a look at this site.

--Melissa Healy

   

Day care: Better is better, but more is not

No surprise that there's lots of buzz today about a new study finding that lots of day care in early childhood continues to influence the behavior and school performance of kids more than a decade later. After all, having your child in a day-care center or family day care in the years before kindergarten is pretty standard, if you're lucky enough to have a job these days.

And these latest findings, published Friday in the journal Child Development, weren't entirely reassuring. At 15, kids who spent longer hours in day care as toddlers were more impulsive and more risk-taking, by their own account, than kids who spent less time in such care. The good news is that, if it was high-quality care, there were clear academic benefits and even some compensating behavioral benefits: these kids were a bit less aggressive and more compliant than kids in poorer care.

Unfortunately, the number of kids thought to have had good-quality care were a minority. Of the 1,364 kids enrolled in the nation's largest and longest-running study of child care in 1991, 60% were judged to have low or moderately low-quality care, and just 16% had care that was rated by the researchers as high quality.

Psychologist Jay Belsky of Birbeck University London, said the long-running, federally funded study -- of which he is an investigator -- has performed an important function: to get parents, policy makers and researchers to acknowledge that the quality of day care isn't the only thing that might affect a child's trajectory. The amount of time a little one spends in the care of someone outside of his family -- or as he put it, "the dosage effect" -- also matters.

And the latest results suggest that mo' is not better.

If that makes you nervous, Belsky says, don't shoot the messenger. It's not always politically correct to tell parents that the child-care arrangements they make while working might have negative effects on our kids' lives, but good research has to be served up honestly, he says.

"My goal is not to discredit day care. It's to report openly and honestly on its effects," Belsky says.

This study is the latest product of a highly respected research team underwritten by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. Called the Early Child Care Research Network, the group of 20 institutions scattered across the United States have been following these kids, now on the cusp of high school graduation, since birth. Independent researchers acknowledge that while their findings have often been hard to hear, this is not a group with an axe to grind.

"No one wants to add more stress to the lives of working parents -- especially in hard economic times," said Sharon Landeman Ramey, professor of child and family studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. "But it would be irresponsible not to let everyone know that what happens to young children makes a difference that can be lasting." 

For what it's worth, not all mothers are fuming at the latest news -- and in the bad old days of "Mommy Wars," these studies incited some furious reaction. One mom, April McCaffery, author of the blog SoCalMom  and the mother of two daughters who spent lots of time in day care, said the debate over whether women should work outside the home and have their kids cared for by others while they do so is no longer a debate worth having or stoking. "We should use this information to improve things for kids"  and to help guide our individual decisions about our own kids.

McCaffery, 37 of Burbank, sees plenty of evidence of impulsiveness and even a little risk-taking in her two kids, Sylvia, 12, and Riley, 9. It doesn't scare her, she says. But now that she sees that her daughters' willingness "to put themselves out there" may have been shaped, in part, in day care, "maybe I need to find more opportunities to be more actively involved" in helping them navigate new challenges. For parents whose kids seem shy and risk-averse and who spent their toddler years quietly at home -- McCaffery says the latest study might suggest they should back off a bit on the "helicopter parenting" and let their kids act on a few impulses. 

"It's a balance," says McCaffery, a fulltime paralegal as well as blogging mom.

-- Melissa Healy